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Throughout the twentieth century, the ideas of plurality and especially the multicultural vision of social integration have been considered to be the special secrets of North American practices of national belonging. Such nationalizing assessments of plurality enabled often antagonistic cultural, ethnic, racial, religious and gender groups to join hands on the commons of a so-called "constitutional faith." In North America, two nations compete for the possession of this special secret which looks back on a "history of commitment to common civil practices" (Barber 612). Canada, as much as the USA, claims to be a trailblazer for policies that enable social incorporation and peaceful coexistence. However, throughout their respective histories these countries with immigration histories older than the nation states themselves both have used coercive methods to restrict the power of undesirable groups within and to exclude the immigration of people that were marked by evolving definitions of wealth and education, class and ethnicity from without. In this course, we will read the major political speeches of American and Canadian governmental representatives alongside the defenses of cultural pluralism written by people such as Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, Randolph Bourne, Emily Pauline Johnson, and Frederick Philip Grove. |
